1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for performing handover in a wireless communication system. In particular, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for reducing the load of handover signals generated in the handover of a terminal.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile communication systems have developed to provide the subscribers with voice communication services on the move. With the advance of technologies, the mobile communication systems have been evolved to support high speed data communication services as well as the standard voice communication services. However, the mobile communication systems face resource shortage and user requirements for speed service and thus there is a need of more advanced mobile communication system.
In order to accomplish the requirements, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is standardizing Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) as one of the next generation mobile communication systems. LTE is a high speed packet-based communication technology aiming at the data rate of up to 100 Mbps and evolving to LTE-A to support advanced data rate of up to a few hundreds Mbps. Nevertheless, since the increase in number of terminals (User Equipment, UE) served by a base station increases and thus sharing the resource causes resource shortage, each UE may be served at very low data rate even though the system actually supports high packet transmission service. In order to solve this problem with the extension of service area and increase of network capacity, it is considered to introduce the deployment of a plurality of small size base stations, e.g., micro base station or pico base station having a small service area as compared to the legacy macro base station or femto cell having the service area limited to indoor use.